Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Russian Civil-Military Relations (review)

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sais.1997.0023

1946-4444

Lyle J. Goldstein,

Defense, Military, and Policy Studies

Reviewed by: Russian Civil-Military Relations Lyle Goldstein Russian Civil-Military Relations. By Dale Herspring. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 272 pp. $ 35.00/Cloth In the debate concerning the impact of NATO expansion on the nature of Russian politics, one frequently hears that ordinary Russians are apparently indifferent to the “threat” from NATO. But the more vital question is how Russian civilian and military elites in national security policy will interpret the expansion of the alliance. Indeed, the stable and effective interaction between these two groups on a host of vital issues must form the essential bedrock of Russian democracy and more broadly Russian and European security. This interaction is the subject of a valuable new inquiry by Dale Herspring entitled Russian Civil-Military Relations. Herspring’s study emphasizes the role of history in determining present and future patterns of Russian civil-military relations. The author’s argument that contemporary challenges facing Russian civil-military relations closely resemble those of the 1920s is well-informed and particularly effective. The Bolsheviks, lacking professional military expertise were forced to employ politically suspect, but effective officers from the Tsar’s army during and after its Civil War. Similarly, Russia’s democratic reformers have grappled with the challenge of controlling an officer corps that does not necessarily share the new regime’s values and goals. Other similarities which make the analogy even more compelling include: the existence of relatively open debate on military [End Page 210] issues; the paucity of national resources dedicated to the military; and the improvised management of military policy during both periods. On the basis of this analogy, Herspring predicts that Russian civil-military relations will continue to be fraught with conflict and crises, though he emphasizes that the chances of a military coup are low due to deep divisions within the military. Besides orchestrating this intriguing analogy, Herspring looks closely at developments in Soviet civil-military relations under Gorbachev. The author makes a unique observation about these relationships in the late 1980s when he notes that, “The military had co-opted the party-political apparatus [within the military]. In practical terms, this meant that the military leadership largely determined what the Main Political Administration (MPA) did and how it functioned.” The MPA had traditionally helped to ensure Army compliance with Party dictates. Deprived of this instrument of civilian control, Gorbachev undertook increasingly radical steps to control the military, for example the 1987 purge that followed the landing of a Cessna in Red Square by West German Mathias Rust. In spite of this growing autonomy, Herspring contends that during the eighties the Soviet military formed by and large, a “cadre of well-trained apolitical professionals.” This interpretation of the Soviet legacy contrasts sharply with a second recent study of Soviet civil-military relations by Thomas Nichols. Nichols argues that the Soviet officer corps was extremely political, steeped in Marxist ideology to such an extent that, by Gorbachev’s tenure, the military was more radically Communist than the Party itself. A critical question, therefore, emerges from these opposing perspectives: is the dramatic politicization of the Russian officer corps since 1991 (which both authors observe) an historical anomaly as Herspring suggests or simply a continuation of earlier practices as Nichols contends? Herspring’s position remains somewhat unclear, and moreover he seems to contradict himself elsewhere in the book when he writes, “[Soviet military officers] had been imbued with the idea that the Communist Party played the ‘leading role’ in society for so many years that they [have in post-Soviet times] found it hard to conceive of a situation in which an apolitical military could exist. The idea that the military officers could serve the state and the nation without being active in a party never occurred to them.” This otherwise strong and timely book has only a few other minor deficiencies. First, it looks at three distinct periods in Russian civil-military [End Page 211] relations, but does not address the two most critical historical moments for the Soviet officer corps: Stalin’s ruthless purges of the 1930’s and the victory in World War II. Readers interested in Soviet civil-military relations should look elsewhere to understand the impact...